Alexandra Fössinger is a German/Italian native speaker from the northern Italian province of South Tyrol. She has lived in Italy, Germany and Sweden and is fluent in several languages; her poems, which she writes mainly in English, try to express those multilingual experiences. She works for an Italian advertising agency.
The Apothecary’s Dream
They’re dancing, enormous crowds on a field,
a Brueghel kermis just outside town
to celebrate the world’s ending,
unmasked.
“What is happiness?
Sometimes nothing more than a full belly
and a few hours to forget the squalid drudgery.”
An Odyssey had brought me home,
where I found him waiting, thirty years and more
for life to begin elsewhere.
It would have taken me a lesser place
not to recognise his face
altered by age and sadness,
how displaced he was,
his laboratory coat serving
as an inn keeper’s costume.
He seemed forsaken, sitting between tables,
shrugging his shoulders at a time
that was no longer his,
as if it ever had been —
While all around they tossed their arms,
and legs and breaths at one another,
with no need for protection,
we, who had been open and sick for each other,
kept our distance.
© Alexandra Fossinger
discontinuation
the body knows it will not make it to september
a declaration of war declares
that war will end
but september provides time only
to grow old
we wait in a death row
we make our planet sing
on the telephone each week
making up a happier life
for an hour
we climb out of silence
i’m thankful for my birdhands
they free me from the slavery of being human
perfect my body
in a truer way
last night
i dreamt of a former love 24 years ago were closer
than you and I are in space
we who disgraced now humbly share
this continually protracted
luckdown
© Alexandra Fossinger
I live in the spider flat now,
we share the last space I’m given.
Hungrily, they scuff in the dust
of the dried-out, milked-out heart.
Head hanging down, I am held
by the thread gouging greedily
into the prison months.
Who fed me, who held my hands,
divided my fingers until they became
myriads, tributaries of rivers?
Static in the darkness I travelled
the red and purple insides of your body,
warmed my hand in the safe space
between your undulating heart and
the walls confining it; for every second
I was too soft, I was your pericardium.
And then, the coronary explosion.
And then, the loud bang,
exiling me into the spider flat,
the darkest age for ever between us.
© Alexandra Fossinger
You tried for years to be
a girl’s heron, folded your
wings to a fraction of
their beating, you, simply
uncontainable
where should you have
placed them, large as
they were?
Your feathery essence,
voluminous,
luminous,
demanded, often,
something more solid,
a horse’s gallop, its energy,
hooves stirring the dust,
but eluded understanding:
hers, theirs.
A dream, she
demanded, firmly,
I want it, try
to resurface for me,
but something made you
strand, lie there dying with
the big sad eyes of a mammal
who had its tears stolen.
What do they want,
who cannot read us?
I never saw you as less than
the sentient guardian of
your fragile
animal nature,
human by coincidence.
And loved your gifts:
conversing with birds, trees
before I loved you.
I did not want to
befall you by
acquaintance
or alter your dreams
to make me enter
your garden.
I was as cautious
as you
never to break the eggshell
but the eggshell breaks,
eventually,
is flaw brought to
perfection.
“A whale is no more a fish than a horse is.”
© Alexandra Fossinger